Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination.
A Reinterpretation of Marx‘ Critical Theory

Should
Marx be given yet
another chance? Is there anything left to gain by returning to texts
whose earnest exegesis has occupied
countless interpreters, both friendly and hostile, for generations?
Has Marx‘s credibility survived the global debacle of those regimes
and movements who drew inspiration from his work, however poorly they
understood it? Is it premature to conclude that we have entered a new
era in which post-Marxism has joined a host of other
“post-”phenomena
as transitional bridges to a future whose outlines are still only
dimly visible?

The answer to all of these questions proposed by
Moishe Postone‘s remarkable new book is a resounding and
unapologetic yes. Without worrying about patching up the alleged
holes in Marx with arguments from psychoanalysis, structuralism,
rational choice theory, deconstruction or other possible
alternatives, he argues that virtually all the resources are there in
Marx‘s own writings for a viable critique of modern society.
Without agonizing over the unity and coherence of Marx‘s thought or
entertaining Alvin Gouldner‘s claim that there are at least two
Marxisms, critical and scientific, with equal claim to textual
legitimation, he provides a strong reading – largely focused on
Capital
and the Grundrisse
– of what he considers the essential
message of Marx‘s work as a whole. Not even the now familiar
distinction between the young and mature Marx survives his desire to
present “Marx‘s critique of political
economy in as logically
coherent and systematically powerfull way as possible.”
[ 1 ]
Postone‘s ultimate goal is no less than the laying of a firm
theoretical foundation for a detailed account of a global capitalism
that is still vulnerable to Marxist critique.

Yet for all of Postone‘s unapologetic fidelity
to the letter and spirit of Marx‘s work, there is nothing of the
sectarian or the dogmatic in his reinterpretation. Reasoned arguments
rather than appeals to textual authority, close consideration of
alternative positions rather than dismissive polemics, painstaking
expositions rather than promissory notes characterize a work that
will enlighten and stimulate even those who may ultimately remain
unconvinced by its conclusions. Although it is by no meant easy
reading because of its uncompromisingly
high level of argumentation (and tendency to repeat its main points
excessively), Time, labor, and Social
Domination is
worth the effort for anyone still uneasy with the thought that late
capitalism must forever be the best socioeconomic solution to the
dilemmas of human existence.

Postone‘s basic strategy is reculer
pour mieux sauter. That
is, he willingly abandons much of what normally passes for Marxist
theory in order to salvage a core of defensible ideas. What he terms
“traditional Marxism” not only encompasses standard Second
International, Leninist, Troiskyist.and even most Marxist Humanist
versions, but also serves, he argues, as the (strawman) target of
pessimistic critics of Marx like Friedrich Pollock and more
optimistic ones like Jürgen Habermas. He identifies it with “all
theoretical approaches that analyze capitalism from the standpoint of
labor and characterize that society essentially in terms of class
relations, structured by private ownership of the means of production
and a market-regulated economy”(7). Following from this premise, he
argues, is an image of socialism as the collective ownership of means
of production that are no longer in the service of a dominating
class, but which are sail continuous with the industrialized model
that characterizes high capitalism. Not surprisingly, the “actually
existing socialism” of the former Soviet bloc was, in his eyes, far
less of a break with capitalism that it purported to be. In fact, its
reliance on the centralized planning of a large-scale industrial
economy should be called “the most rigid,
vulnerable, and oppressive form of state-interventionist capitalism”
(14) instead of a true alternative.

The traditional reading
of Marxism, Postone contends, seriously misrepresents Marx‘s
attitude towards labor, value and history. Rather than holding that
labor is the transhistorical source of value, a source which is
merely alienated under capitalism, Marx identified capitalism
precisely with a system in which labor – alienated or not,
“dead”
or “living” is a subordinate issue – has become the
primary
constituter of the social world. Rather than believing that exchange
value is the capitalist surrogate for the real value created by
labor, Marx understood the very category of “value” as an
expression of capitalist social relations. Rather than seeing history
as an inevitable and automatic unfolding of a universal law of
development, Marx understood such law-like regularities as themselves
a function of the capitalist form of social organization, in which
all relations are yoked together in a totalizing system, indeed, any
transhistorical claims were foreign to Marx‘s critique of
capitalism, which remained doggedly focused on just dial historical
formation and no other. Accordingly, “totality” was not a
positive term in his vocabulary signifying a theoretical grasp of all
of history or a normative goal to be realized in the socialist
future, but rather a negative term expressing the capitalist drive to
subordinate otherness to the rule of the same.

Genuine socialism, Postone understands Marx to be
saying, can only be said to have arrived when labor no longer serves
as the central social motor of a totalized system that posits
something called “value” (use, exchange, or
labor) as its standard of worth. Marx‘s
critique was far more fundamental than had been imagined by friendly
interpreters like Maurice Dobb, Joan Robinson or Paul Sweezy, who
read him as little more than a left Ricardian. Postone‘s Marx is
the author of a radical critique of political economy, including its
labor theory of value, not a critical version of
political economy.

Because of his understanding of the need to
overcome the domination of labor, Marx also knew that the
proletariat, as the laboring class far
excellence of capitalism, cannot be the
grave-digger of capitalism, insofar as it is itself a function of the
very hypertrophy of labor that characterizes the system it seeks to
overcome. However understandable it may have been to enhance the
dignity of labor at a time when workers were being increasingly
exploited and their actual immiseration – defined by Postone as
their work growing “one-sided and empty”
(347) – was rising, it is nonetheless
wrong to transform that class into the saviors of mankind. So-called
praxis philosophers, who sought a point
d‘appui for
their critique in the activity of a potentially universal class, were
thus misguided. Freedom from
labor as the mediating motor of society,
not the freedom of
specific kind of non-alienated, social labor will mark the end of the
capitalist order. Not the proletariat as the new expressive
meta-subjcct of history, as Georg Lukács had thought in
History and Class Consciousness,
but rather the end of all such abstractly
universal meta-subjects will spell its transcendence. “Overcoming
alienation, in this view, involves the abolition
of the self-grounding, self-moving Subject
(capital) and the form of labor that
constitutes and is constituted by structures of alienation” (224).

Concomitantly, the more equitable redistribution
of the outcome of modern industrial production cannot be enough to
signal the new age: modern industrial production is not extrinsic to
capitalism, but rather partakes of its ultimate project of
valorization. Nor can the reappropriation of surplus
value by the working class transform the
system, since value itself is the problem. For the historical page to
be turned, Postone‘s Marx claims, the capitalist mode of industrial
production itself must be undone. The fundamental contradiction of
that system is not between private appropriation and socialized
production, but rather “within
the sphere of production itself, whereby
that sphere includes the immediate process of production and
the structure of social relations
constituted by labor in capitalism” (35). Within capitalist
production, labor acquires a double character, at once concrete and
abstract, particular and universal, which then determines the
antinomic structure of the social totality as a whole. It is apparent
in the commodity form of the market place and the political form of
bourgeois democracy, both of which reveal a split between
concrete-material and abstract-social dimensions. To privilege one or
the other is to succumb to fetishism, which manifests itself, inter
alia, in the
reduction of abstract labor to an instrumental tool for the endless
maximization of profit (the increase of value), the reification of
commodities as “things” devoid of social mediation, and the
substitution of abstract markers of exchange (money) for real wealth.
This fetishism is evident in the epistemological dualisms, most
famously those of Kant, they have plagued bourgeois thought.

Perhaps the most fundamental expression – indeed source – of the
double-sided, fetishistic character of labor under capitalism occurs
on the basic level of its temporality, a theme to which Posione
devotes an especially acute chapter. The category of value, he
argues, is created when abstract, invariable, mechanically
homogenized time is split off from the lived time of concrete
production. The latter, Postone hastens to add, is merely the reverse
of the former and should not be fetishized as a fully realized form
of temporal experience in itself (or, as with Lukács, turned
into a romanticized version of “historical” as opposed to
mechanical time). Such a differentiation cannot be understood, as it
has been by commentators like David Landes, merely in terms of new
technical inventions, such as the escapement clock of the thirteenth
century, but as a result of social changes in the organization of
work and urban life in combination with that technology. The result
is the uncoupling of a measure of worth in terms of abstract units of
the time spent in laboring (value) from a measure based on the use of
the products produced (material wealth). Although money, the
circulation of commodities, and even certain forms of capital (e.g.
merchant) can he found at an earlier period, true capitalism begins
only with the full-fledged emergence of value based on the
abstraction of labor as a totalizing force.

Yet with that emergence also comes the germ of its demise. According
to Postone‘s Marx, although increased productivity based on
technological advances does not multiply the value of the labor
expended, it does increase material wealth. Capitalism‘s central
contradiction is thus “that value remains the determining form of
wealth and of social relations in capitalism, regardless of
developments in productivity; however, value also becomes
increasingly anachronistic in terms of the material wealth-producing
potential of the productive forces to which it gives rise” (197).
The proletariat also becomes anachronistic; although its labor
remains the source of value, it is no longer important for the
creation of material wealth.

Because this contradiction has not been resolved,
Posione concludes, the system is still dynamic and prone to
instability, providing a ground for resisting the pessimistic
conclusion of those like the early Frankfurt School who saw only a
one-dimensional, administered world replicating itself ad infinitum.
An immanent critique of capitalism‘s dialectical contradictions,
and not one that merely pity ideals against their betrayal in
reality, is thus, despite everything, still possible. Whether or not
it leads to class conflict, whether or not it produces a new
historical agent eager to overthrow the system, the contradictory
essence of capitalism remains in effect. There may not be a logic to
history in general – indeed, Postone explicitly claims Marx rejects
this idea – but there is one in the specific social formation
called capitalism. Its outcome is an ever-intensifying tension
between the “potential
of the species-general capabilities that
have been accumulated, and their existent,
alienated form
as constituted by the dialectic of the two
dimensions of labor and of time” (360).

* * *

Even this hurried synopsis of
Postone‘s much richer and more complicated argument will give some
sense of its ambition and scope. It is no easy task to respond to it
on the level of theoretical sophistication that it demands. One
question that can quickly be answered, however, concerns the accuracy
of his reading of Marx. It can be answered by simply by-passing it.
Unless one is caught up in the increasingly tedious game of
discerning intentions and relying on their authority in legitimating
arguments, it is irrelevant whether or not Postone‘s Marx is the
“real” one. Doubtless textual evidence could be produced to show
that Marx did count on the proletariat to challenge capitalism or
really did hold to a transhistorical notion of labor, but I‘m not
sure the results would be particularly helpful in dealing with the
theoretical issues Postone raises. Certainly, the intellectual
historian will want to know why Marx was so easily and consistently
misunderstood by the multifarious figures Postone lumps together
under the rubric of “traditional Marxism”; this is not a trivial
issue. The more pressing question, however, is whether ror not
Postone‘s version of Marx‘s ideas can survive on their own
merit.

A number of fundamental issues must be addressed here. The first
concerns the theme of dominating abstraction, which is central to
Postone‘s reading of Marx. Capitalism is particularly pernicious,
he tells us, because of its dual abstraction of temporality and
labor, which then produces an alienated system of social relations
controlling humanity from without like a metaphysical Subject. In
addressing the claims of earlier theorists like Alfred Sohn-Rethel,
who noted the relationship between abstract philosophy in Greece and
the rise of coinage and commodities, he argues that only with modern
capitalism does the domination of abstraction become genuinely total.
In prior systems, he claims, social relations were more explicit and
immediate. According to Marx, “capitalism‘s social relations arc
unique in that they do nor appear to be social at all. The structure
of relations constituted by commodity-determined labor undermines
earlier systems of oven social ties without, however, replacing them
with a similar system. Instead, what emerges is a social universe
that Marx describes as one of personal independence in a context of
objective dependence” (259). As Postone puts it elsewhere,
“capitalism differs fundamentally from other societies in that its
characterizing social relations are not overt but are
’objectively‘
constituted and, hence, do not appear to be socially specific at all”
(273). To give a final example: the crisis of capitalism, he claims,
begins “when the alienated social totality that is greater than its
parts could no longer be understood solely in lerms of die
individuals immediately involved in its constitution” (336).

Is it the case, however, that earlier societies were not dominated by
alienated abstraction, but instead more overtly revealed their social
relations as constituted by individuals, or at least concealed them
in loss problematic ways? Although Postone‘s claim about the
relative importance of abstraction in the Greece examined by
Sohn-Rethel and modern capitalism is hard to gainsay, the existence
of commodities, money, and abstract philosophy in the earlier society
suggests only a difference in degree, not in kind. There are,
moreover, other sources of abstraction, which may also dominate the
humans subject to them, that Postone never adequately considers,
perhaps because he does not see them as producing genuine domination.
Certainly monotheism, whose invention is traditionally attributed to
the Jews, provides a salient instance of abstraction with a
vengeance. A God who is indivisible, invisible, and transcendent is
certainly a powerful example of the human tendency to abstract, a
tendency which cannot be derived from capitalist relations of
production.

Nor can that no less fundamental human invention, language, which
necessarily employs abstract signifiers to signify an infinity of
different phenomena. Postone‘s critique of Habermas‘s linguistic
turn accepts perhaps too easily the notion that language is primarily
a medium of intersubjective communication, and neglects instead its
inevitably abstracting function, its existence as an always already
existing system no one has consciously constructed. His own stress on
the reifying power of abstract labor prevents him from confronting
head-on the implications of the linguistic theories that were so
influential in the rise of structuralist and posisiruciuralisi
thought.

Postone‘s inclination to subordinate all forms of prior abstraction
to those of capitalism – or at least to consider only capitalist
abstraction as truly dominating – is perhaps nowhere as evident as
in his brief consideration of Durkheim‘s dualistic sociology:
“[Durkheim‘s] oppositions of society and the individual, soul
and
body, the abstract, general and the concrete particular – whereby
only the first, abstract term of each opposition is understood as
social – can be grasped as hypostatizations and projections of the
commodity form” (225). Although one might plausibly argue that
Durkheim‘s polarity between social and non-social may reflect the
dominant ideology of his day, itself somehow a reflection of
commodification, his central distinction between the sacred and the
profane cannot. Additionally, insofar as the sacred is a category of
virtually all religions, it is hard to conclude that alienating
differentiation is a function of capitalism alone.

The sacred, to be sure, may not be precisely equivalent to the
abstract – indeed, in certain respects it is the opposite – but
it does suggest that precapitalist social relations were less overt,
less transparent, than Postone avers. In fact, the very category of
“the social” was not available for explicit thematization until
the industrial revolution. Prior to that time, social relations were
generally cast in natural or theological terms; what, after all, was
the powerful metaphor of the Great Chain of Being, which was so
fundamental to feudal society? To contend that only under capitalism
does the alienation of the social first occur is thus problematic,
although it may well be construed as occurring in new and more
sinister ways.

If Postone‘s conceptualization of precapitalist
societies can be questioned for underestimating their sources of
abstraction, so too can his implied image of an alternative after
capitalism. That image is implied because he tries to follow the
traditional Marxist injunction against depicting the realm of freedom
as the realm of necessity. Instead, he argues that the contradictions
of capitalism point towards possibilities whose realization cannot be
foreseen, “the potential
of the species-general capabilities that
have been accumulated” (360). Still, Postone throws out sufficient
hints to allow the reader to piece together a sense of what the
post-capitalist order might be. First, he explicitly eschews a
normative vantage point based on a romantic notion of immediate unity
and plenitudinous de-differentiation, a society in which all work
would become play. Although he wants the abolition of abstract social
doming tion, he is also wary of its simple negation in the name of
“life” or “the
concrete” (the type of program that often fed romantic
anti-capitalism of the right). Somehow it is the overcoming of the
abstract/concrete dichotomy, as well as other comparable oppositions
(agency/structure, subject/object, manual/mental labor, etc.), that
is his tacit goal.

Second, although he wants to free Marx from the
image of a productivist advocate of industrial development, he still
accepts the idea that consciously and deliberately “making” the
world is the definition of socialism. There is in his thinking none
of that Heideggerian inflected invocation of “unworked,”
“inoperative” or “unavowed” communities that
inspire other
critics of productivism like Jean-Luc Nancy or Maurice Blanchot, none
of the hostility to the valorization of
poesis in
the realm of action as in the work of an Arendt. “Marx‘s
conception of the overcoming of capitalism,” Postone insists,
“can
be understood in terms of people gaining control over such
quasi-objective developments, of processes of ongoing and
accelerating social transformations, which they themselves have
constituted” (384).

Such “people” are not, however, to be understood as a
meta-subjekt, nor are they identified with any specific social group
such as the proletariat; although Postone makes a few half-hearted
gestures towards new social movements, he frankly acknowledges that
“no existing social form represents the determinate negation of
capitalism” (358). As a result, the possibilities he detects in the
contradictions of capitalism remain themselves problematically
abstract, and what he says of Habermas – “it is not evident why
the appeal to practical reason could be more than an exhortation”
(241) – can be turned against his own appeal to immanent
contradictions that lack any practical embodiment. Showing that
structural conditions for change exist is a far cry from explaining
the motor of the change itself.

Indeed, there is a danger in assuming that such immanent
contradictions necessarily or even tendentially produce the
motivation – subjective or objective – for their overcoming.
Marx‘s opposition, as Postone presents it, between abstract value
and material wealth operates on the premise that the latter is an
absolute alternative of the former, that one is dominating and the
other liberating. Yet might it not be possible to see them as
mutually entailed, the one needing the other as its antithesis?
Postone recognizes this in his discussion of the relationship between
the varieties of value, in which he refuses to juxtapose use value or
value based on labor as completely innocent alternatives to exchange
value, but when it comes to the couplet value/wealth, the lesson is
lost. Instead, “wealth” becomes a marker for a postalienated
state in which abstractions and differentiations would still exist,
but in purely benign ways intended by conscious human action.

In a re-cent commentary on the Utopian Marxism of
Fredric Jameson, Steven Connor has made a point that could just as
easily be directed to Postone: ”In defining value [in Postone‘s
case, wealth] so utterly and absolutely in terms which go beyond
exchange-value, Jameson is in fact evacuating it of all force or
human relevance. Far from embodying the possibility of value as
such, the
universe of absolutely incomparability which Jameson sees as coming
before and, presumably, after the era of exchange-value, would in
fact allow for no possibility of value at
all, since
a universe in which nothing could be compared with anything else by
any shared scale of measurement would be a universe of absolute
inertness, or valuelessness.”
[ 2 ]

Put in the terms of Postone‘s reading of Marx, some abstraction is
necessary to provide the commensurability needed to make wealth a
meaningful category. In political terms, the same point holds.
According to Postone, postcapitalist democracy would require “the
abolition of the abstract social compulsions rooted in the social
forms grasped by the Marxian categories” (41). Yet other
abstractions would have to fill the gap, for how, after all, can any
democracy operate withour such categories as “the people,”
“popular sovereignty,” “citizenship,” “one
person, one
vote,” etc., all of which require some sort of abstraction. Even
the most doggedly anti-representative notion of direct democracy must
depend on a radical egalitarianism that levels difference; Although
such political abstractions may not have the dominating effect of
that of labor, they too may inadvertently exclude and marginalize
some groups deemed outside their reach.

In short, once the abstraction of labor is
overcome, assuming it can be, what is to prevent other abstractions,
perhaps equally totalizing, from merging to take its place? At one
point in his argument, Postone chastises Habermas for failing “to
allow for a distinction among forms of abstractions” (257), a
criticism which shows Postone recognizes the possibility that not all
abstractions are to be subsumed under the domination of labor. In
general, however, .the version of Marx he presents relies on a strong
notion of a master abstraction, that of labor, which determines or at
least overwhelmingly mediates all the rest in capitalism. Although he
successfully undermines the inverted implication of this claim –
that in post-capitalist societies, unalienated, concrete labor will
provide the basis for a liberated humanity – his argument still
implies that a qualitative transformation will occur when
capitalism‘s master abstraction is somehow undone. Yet no amount of
redcscribing Marx‘s project will avoid raising the question of
whether or nor others will arise in its place. The dialectic of
abstract and concrete, like that of the other antinomies of bourgeois
thought and life, may well bo harder to master than Marx imagined.
Emancipation, whatever that exalted word may mean, may well entail
freedom from the belief that we can ever gather in all the alienated
abstractions that have defined human culture well before the onset of
that totalizng meta-subject called capital, Postone has deftly
alerted us to the larger issues raised by Marx‘s remarkable work,
but he has opened more questions than he has answered. For Marx
to remain a reliable guide into the next
millennium, it is these questions that his self-critical defenders
will have to address. Postone has cleared a great deal of ground, but
the foundations for a new and stronger edifice are still to be
constructed.

Anmerkungen:

[ 1 ]
Postone 19. (Hereafter, all references will be given parenthetically
within the text.) If there is any distinction, he argues, it is not
between a youthful humanist and a mature idealistic Marx, but rather
between one who thinks in more universalistic categoriies and one
who is more rigorously historical and self-reflexive about hit own
historical specificity.